Filling in the Gaps: DDA e-books pilot project in

Religious Studies and History

ATLA 2013

Jennifer Dekker & Tony Horava

University of Ottawa, Canada

Outline

• University of Ottawa introduction• The Library – a snapshot• Collection development strategies for

books• Setup issues and challenges• History & Religious Studies

departments • Project goals • Project analysis

University of Ottawa – located in Canada’s capital

University of Ottawa – a snapshot

• North America’s largest bilingual university (English/French)• One of Canada’s top 10 research universities • We are an ARL member (as of 2010)• Students and faculty from 150 countries• In Fall 2012 : 42,027 students enrolled

– 35,700 undergraduates– 6,327 graduates

• 10 Faculties: Arts, Social Sciences, Education, Management, Science, Engineering, Common Law, Civil Law, Health Sciences and Medicine.

• Four libraries ( Arts & Sciences, Health Sciences, Law, Management)

The Library – by the numbers

• Collection budget: 15.7M (2013/14)• About 60% dedicated to serials & other ongoing

commitments• 160 FTE staff: 45 Librarians and 115 administrative

staff• 25,095 journal subscriptions • 94,045 accessible journals• 2,247,148 print books• 727,610 Ebooks • 745 research databases • ~100,000 books & other items acquired 2012-13

Library strategy for books

• A mix of parallel approaches :

• Frontlist agreements with major publishers for ebooks;

• Print books on approval;• Ebooks on approval (e-preferred plans);• Print and and ebooks as firm orders;• Subscription to ebook collections where

appropriate (eg Computer science)• Consortial opportunities in Canada• Demand-driven opportunities

Relationship with YBP

• Principal book vendor since 2004; the result of a multi-year approval plan pilot process with several vendors

• We buy US, UK, English Canadian, and other English books worldwide from YBP

• Approval plans in all disciplines: Humanities, Social Sciences, Science and Engineering, Law, Medicine, etc.

• Ratio of firm orders to approvals: 60/40

• 50% of total purchases are from YBP and arrive Shelf-ready; MARC records received from OCLC

• Each subject librarian manages his or her own profile; non-subject parameters are set at the plan level.

Initial decision-making for project…

• Choice of platform : ebrary

• Choice of format: ebook rather than p book

• Purchase rather than short-term rental

• SUPO (single user purchase option)  

• Choice of payment mode: deposit account

• Special fund account

• Funding from the Morisset Library (Arts and Sciences) book budget.

Initial decision-making (cont’d)

• Integration with existing approval plans was important; automatic books would still arrive

• The new DDA plan was carved out of the slips portion of the YBP approval profile

• The creation of a retrospective pool of matching titles was crucial for the goals of this project: no cut-off date (except de-duplication only done on last 5 years of holdings).

DDA Trigger events

Any of these activities:

- User views the content of one ebook for ten consecutive minutes, or- User views ten unique pages of one ebook, or- One page (or portion thereof) of an ebook has been copied or printed.

Setup issues• De-duping essential:

• Block publishers with whom we have blanket agreements for frontlist ebook coverage; and block what we acquired via consortial purchase (OCUL* PDA pilot in 2010 and CRKN** purchase in 2008);

• We use YBP Library Holdings Load Service for duplication detection (5 years of holdings);

• Update loading was done - it is now done on a monthly basis with our OCLC reporting.

• *Ontario Council of University Libraries (provincial)• ** Canadian Research Knowledge Network

(federal)

Setup issues (loaders)• We created a discovery loader that matches on

the title aggregator (ebrary) number in the 001 field and discards discovery records that match our holdings - to take into account the lack of, or unreliability, of ISBNs. 

• Ebrary records do not have an ISBN 020 field (stripped out by the vendor during the batch record creation) but they do have a 001 field (aggregator title number).

• We decided to report only for the last 5 years of holdings

• A point-of-invoice loader created to replace the discovery records for triggered titles with full records by matching on the 035 field (ebrary)

• Librarians are able to recognize a DDA title in the catalogue, via the fund code and vendor code in the MARC record and distinctive call number.

Logistics for implementation

• Many duplicates were discarded when we sent YBP our ISBN lists and they set our holdings in GOBI;

• In addition when we loaded the large file of DDA records, 4,850 were loaded, 923 were rejected (dups) by the discovery record loader leaving 3,927 base titles in the pool;

• About 40 new records added per week to the pool;

• A total of 5,982 discovery records loaded during the project period.

Timelines

Initial interest in DDA plan:•July 2011

Initial interest in DDA plan:•July 2011

Discussionwith YBP and ebrary re: logistics and decisions:•Sept-Oct 2011

Discussionwith YBP and ebrary re: logistics and decisions:•Sept-Oct 2011

DDA profile created; initial pool of titles; Acq. profile setup:•Nov. ’11

DDA profile created; initial pool of titles; Acq. profile setup:•Nov. ’11

Discovery & overlay loaders created and loading done; cleanup of files:•Feb.-March 2012

Discovery & overlay loaders created and loading done; cleanup of files:•Feb.-March 2012

Launch!•March 27, 2012

Launch!•March 27, 2012

Basic workflow – Part 1

Step 1•Alert sent weekly to Ebooks Cataloguer for ‘Discovery’ records matching DDA profile

Step 1•Alert sent weekly to Ebooks Cataloguer for ‘Discovery’ records matching DDA profile

Step 2•Records loaded to the catalogue

Step 2•Records loaded to the catalogue

Step 3 •Trigger event occurs

Step 3 •Trigger event occurs

Step 4•Report sent to Ebooks cataloguer & Acquisition Service for purchased titles

Step 4•Report sent to Ebooks cataloguer & Acquisition Service for purchased titles

Basic workflow – Part 2

Step 5•MARC records given a different call number for identification (Ebrary ebooks)

Step 5•MARC records given a different call number for identification (Ebrary ebooks)

Step 6•Point of invoice records are loaded and overlay the ‘Discovery’ records

Step 6•Point of invoice records are loaded and overlay the ‘Discovery’ records

Step 7 •Payment made by Acquisitions staff

Step 7 •Payment made by Acquisitions staff

Step 8•The process repeated itself weekly

Step 8•The process repeated itself weekly

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Part II

18

1. Lack of historical monographs (due to low

funding especially in the 1990’s)

2. French language collection deficiencies;

3. Little consultation in terms of what was

being collected;

4. Unbalanced collections

Faculty/ Graduate Feedback

U of Ottawa DDA e-book project

Goals

1. Lack of historical monographs (!!!)

2. Test current collection development policies

3. Test desirability of e-books

4. Build relationship with stakeholders.

Focus on faculty members and graduate students

DDA ebrary weekly report

PDA data adapted from Walters’ 2012 study*

University

Date Vendor Titles Available

Titles Bought / Month

Price / Title

Cost /year

Southern Illinois U.

2009 Coutts 8,453 26 $115 $35,995

U. of Florida

2009 Coutts 5,000 32 $107 $41,302

U. of Iowa

2009 ebrary 13,000 72 $103 $88,889

U. of Vermont

2007 YBP 1,502 49 $64 $37,760

U. of York 2009 Springer 3,000 36 $83 $35,939

U. of Ottawa

2012 YBP/ebrary

5,982 41 $100 $49,200

*Walters, William H. (2012). “Patron-Driven Acquisition and the Educational Mission of the Academic Library.” Library Resources & Technical Services 56(3) 199-213.

Difference in percentage between DDA selections and librarian selections at the University of Ottawa

Difference in percentage between DDA selections and librarian selections at the University of Ottawa

Overview of DDA selections

615 total selections ~ 20% not related to History or Religious Studies

497 total selections in target areas:

---- 40.4% Religious Studies

---- 59.6 % History

Subject Number of Titles Selected

Christianity (incl. Theology, Biblical studies)

75 (37%)

Judaism 36 (18%)

Ancient / Late antique (Judeo-Christian) 17 (8.5%)

Islam (All time periods) 14 (7 %)

Buddhist 11 (5.5%)

Sociology of Religion 9 (4.5%)

Medieval 8 (4%)

Psychology of Religion 6 (3%)

Hindu 3 (1.5%)

Indigenous Religions 2 (<1%)

Other (NRM, Interfaith dialogue, General) 20 (10%)

Titles Selected in Religious Studies: Broad Subjects

Publisher Number of Titles Selected

ABC-Clio (almost 100% History) 70

Brill (~ 75% Religion) 58 (avg. price $191 / title)

Palgrave-MacMillan 40

Continuum (almost 100% Rel.) 32 (avg. $132 / title)

Greenwood (almost 100% His.) 23

Routledge 22

Various University Presses 49

DDA Titles: Major Publishers

Average title = $100.04

Publisher Number of Titles Selected

Pluto Press (independent) 10 (generally in D, F)

I.B. Tauris 8 (4 Religious Studies, 4 History)

Mohr Siebeck 8 (Religious Studies)

Zed 4 (History)

Jewish Publication Society 4 (2 Religious Studies, 2 History)

DDA titles: Smaller Publishers

Purchase triggers

U of Ottawa:

Printing = 30Copying = 64Chapter Downloads = 103Viewing (> 10 minutes) = 306

Emily Chan and Susan Kendall (ACRL Conference, April 2013) reported similar triggers at San Jose State.

Ohio State project had a very low trigger and purchased 4,400 titles per year = 370 per month.

Were historical titles selected?

Out of 497 titles in History and Religious Studies:

• 203 titles were published before 2005 (40.8%).

•Oldest title selected published 1951.

• Of the pre-2005 titles, 50% were in Religious Studies.

• Of those published pre-2005, 52 were published before 2000 (25%).

• Of the 497 titles selected, 294 were published after 2005. (59.2%).

The community selected a reasonable proportion of historical titles.

Interlibrary loans during the project period

Religious Studies (75 ILL requests by professors and grad students)

NON-ENGLISH- 34 (45.3%)

PUBLICATION DATE PRE-1950- 8 (10.6%)

History (108 ILL requests by professors and grad students)

NON-ENGLISH - 36 (33%)

PUBLICATION DATE PRE-1950- 35 (32.4%)

No effect on DDA

No effect on DDA

Survey responses

18 completed responses:

- 28% faculty (5) , 72% graduate student (13).

- 50% Religious Studies, 50% History.

- 11% French (2), 89% English (16)

• 11 had noticed an increase in historical e-books in the catalogue.

• 10 indicated that historical gaps are still a problem. 8 said that there was no problem with historical titles.

• 11 respondents indicate that e-books are an acceptable format for studies in their subject area.

• 6 indicated that they prefer print materials for their research and study area.

• Reasons for e-book / print preference focused on reader likes / dislikes, not on what is available in either format.

Survey results

• 75% or 12 respondents felt that the balance between print and e-books in the library today is acceptable.

• Only 8 respondents indicated that they valued the availability of DDA e-book records in the catalogue, available to purchase at any time. 10 respondents either didn’t value them or had no opinion.

• Although only 2 responses were in French, 8 respondents (44%) indicated that a French language DDA e-book plan would be helpful.

Survey results

Final thoughts: DDA data and survey

- E-books are okay!

- DDA e-book plan is not going to manage faculty and graduate concerns regarding historical monographs;

- ILL-based DDA plan incorporating print and e-books probably more useful;

- Demonstrated willingness to include community in selection;

- DDA e-book plan filled in “mainstream” academic titles (current and historical) not ordered when originally published;

- Current collection policy (Religious Studies) is reflected in DDA selections.

Thanks!

•Tony Horavathorava@uottawa.ca

•Jennifer Dekkerjdekker@uottawa.ca